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LP
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BLUME 022LP
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$28.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/24/2025
Since its founding back in 2014, Blume has carved a unique place in cultural landscape, issuing free-standing works, spanning the historical and contemporary, that represent singular gestures of creativity within the field of experimental sound. Joining their broad efforts in building networks of context and understanding, Blume returns with the first ever vinyl release to attend to James Tenney's legendary Postal Pieces. This marks the first ever appearance of five of the suite's works -- "Maximusic, for Max Neuhaus" (1965), "Having Never Written a Note for Percussion, for John Bergamo" (1971), "FFor Percussion Perhaps, or... [Night], for Harold Budd" (1971), "Cellogram, for Joel Krosnick" (1971), and "Beast, for Buell Neidlinger" (1971) -- on vinyl, drawing upon recordings made in 2003, by the Amsterdam based ensemble, The Barton Workshop, under the direction of James Fulkerson. Among the most important and highly regarded efforts in Tenney's canon of compositions, as well as within the history of 20th Century music, these five pieces represent a crucial bridge between Fluxus-oriented conceptualism, minimalism, and the microtonal complexities that would emerge in their wakes. A student of composition under Carl Ruggles, John Cage, Harry Partch, and Edgard Varèse, as well as acoustics, information theory, and tape music composition under Lejaren Hiller, James Tenney carved a wide path within the contexts of experimental and avant-garde music during the second half of the 20th Century. A suite of eleven compositions, The Postal Pieces, stands among Tenney's well known and celebrated compositions, and illuminates the dualities embraced by the composer, notably his use of sound to develop consciousness in and of others, and his willingness to draw on elements and observations of everyday life; citing his strong dislike of writing letters as being the primary inspiration for their inception. The suite is composed around three themes: Tenney's concept of swell form (utilizing repetition and progressing through a structurally symmetrical arch), intonation, and the desire to produce "meditative perceptual states." A hugely important addition to Blume's ever-expanding efforts in context building and networks of creative practice, James Tenney's Post Pieces is issued in a highly limited vinyl edition of 300 copies, which includes an exact replica of the original postcard graphic scores, and features newly commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey.
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2CD
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NW 80810CD
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"Changes: 64 Studies for 6 Harps (1985) is a large-scale work that combines and connects many of James Tenney's (1934-2006) most important theoretical and musical ideas, including gestalt segregation principles and complex intonation systems. Composed with the aid of a mainframe computer at York University, the piece also marks a return to computer-aided, algorithmic composition after a long hiatus. It was one of the first pieces Tenney composed with a computer after he left New York City in the late 1960s to teach at the California Institute of the Arts. After Changes, the majority of Tenney's works involved computer software and formal, algorithmic processes. Tenney was both a prolific composer and theorist but rarely wrote in detail about his own pieces even though his music consistently implemented his theoretical ideas. One exception is his article, 'About Changes,' originally published in the journal Perspectives of New Music. 'About Changes' is a detailed and exhaustive theoretical companion to and description of the piece that carefully documents his compositional procedures, many of which are highly technical and/or mathematical. At the beginning of the article, Tenney writes, 'My intentions in this work were both exploratory and didactic. That is, I wanted to investigate the new harmonic resources that have become available through the concept of 'harmonic space' much more thoroughly than I had in any earlier work. At the same time I wanted to explore these harmonic resources within a formal context that would clearly demonstrate certain theoretical ideas and compositional methods already developed in my computer music of the early 1960s, including the use of stochastic (or constrained-random) processes applied to several holarchical perceptual levels, both monophonically and polyphonically. The references to the I Ching, or Book of Changes, in the titles of the individual studies derive from correlations that were made partly for poetic/philosophical reasons but also -- and perhaps more importantly -- as a means of ensuring that all possible combination of parametric states would be included in the work as a whole. I must confess that I frequently thought of the twenty-four preludes and fugues of J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier as a kind of model for what I wanted to do with the work, although it seems highly unlikely that these studies themselves will ever betray that fact to the listener."
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CD
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NW 80803CD
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"Asked whether he would describe his music as 'Sound for the sake of sound,' James Tenney (1934-2006) replied, 'It's sound for the sake of perceptual insight -- some kind of perceptual revelation.' This release aptly demonstrates Tenney's deep exploratory fascination with the nature and potentialities of aural perception. His attraction to these topics was simultaneously intellectual and sensuous, and its musical products at once invite both sustained reflection and the most immediate of corporeal responses. A number of his works feature pitch collections that progressively approach or diverge from the structure of the harmonic series, or that gradually move between its 'harmonically complex' or 'dissonant' upper reaches and its 'harmonically simple' or 'consonant' lower regions. A paradigmatic example is provided by Harmonium #1 (1976). For 12 String (rising) (1971) represents an arrangement for strings of Tenney's classic electroacoustic composition For Ann (rising) (1969), which predated his interest in harmony. It nonetheless shares with much of his subsequent music a ruthless simplification of form and structure that eschews narrative drama in order to highlight the subjective processes and perceptions of the listener. The first movement of Two Koans and a Canon (1982) is entitled "First Koan (a gentler Beast)" and constitutes a variation upon Tenney's earlier Beast (1971) for solo double bass. It is a study in acoustical beating, an alluring rhythmic pulsation audible between tones whose pitches are sufficiently close to each other. The "Second Koan" in turn recalls Tenney's Koan (1971) for solo violin. It exhibits another of his radically reduced formal designs: a steady cross-string tremolo that gradually migrates upwards in register across the strings of the instrument. The brief final "Canon" is the most structurally complex of the movements. Alone of the three it employs a live tape-delay system. From 1975-84, Tenney produced a number of other compositions calling for the use of a tape-delay system in live performance, which he once referred to as 'the poor man's orchestra' for its ability to produce lush textures from few instruments. The most texturally sophisticated of these pieces is Voice(s) (1984), which requires the use of four separate tape machines. The final track, Blues for Annie (1975), offers a glimpse into the breadth of Tenney's personal musical interests. His appreciation for the blues is expressed forthrightly in a literal transcription and arrangement of Jaybird Coleman's 1927 recording of 'No More Good Water 'Cause the Pond is Dry.' "
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CD
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ZKR 010CD
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International avant-garde ensemble Zeitkratzer continue their Old School series with a release dedicated to the work of American composer James Tenney. This CD presents a new recording of Critical Band -- Tenney's late classic -- with maximum clarity. Also included is the first recording of Harmonium #2. Both works demonstrate the remarkable power and resplendent sharpness which Tenney achieved by composing with pure tunings. Koan: Having Never Written A Note For Percussion, for tam-tam, completes this CD with an orgiastic listening experience in the form of a huge crescendo on this wonderfully simple instrument -- from whispering to singing, culminating in shrill roaring and blustering -- and its dark decay. Tenney's music as a sensual sound adventure! Directed by Reinhold Friedl. Musicians include: Frank Gratkowski (clarinet), Hayden Chisholm (alto saxophone), Matt Davis (trumpet), Hilary Jeffery (trombone), Reinhold Friedl (piano), Maurice de Martin (percussion), Burkhard Schlothauer (violin), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello), Uli Phillipp (double bass) and Ralf Meinz (sound). Recorded live at Philharmonie Luxembourg on October 3, 2009.
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2CD
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NW 80692CD
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"James Tenney (1934-2006) was one of the most versatile figures in contemporary American music. Apart from creating a large, wide-ranging, and fascinating body of compositions, more than a hundred of them, he was one of the key music theorists of the late twentieth century. This CD set offers complete recordings of one of the most important of Tenney's later sets of pieces -- Spectrum Pieces 1-8, the first five of which were written in Toronto in 1995 and the last three in 2001, after he moved to Valencia, California, to teach at the California Institute of the Arts. They offer a summation of much of Tenney's compositional practice and at the same time break open new and fertile territory that he had regrettably little time to explore in subsequent compositions. The eight works were not intended to be listened to sequentially or as a whole set, nor need they be; Tenney thought of them as a 'family' of pieces, with certain shared features, not as a cycle. Collectively they form a body of work in which many of Tenney's musical and theoretical preoccupations converge, interact, and yield music of deep fascination and strange beauty."
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2CD
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NW 80612CD
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"James Tenney (b. 1934) is one of the most important American composers and theorists of the past fifty years. For a very long time, his work was known mainly to other musicians and its tremendous influence was belied by its obscurity. In the past twenty years, however, as his music and writings have been more and more published, recorded, performed, and studied, his place in the context of American contemporary music has become far better understood. He has pioneered musical fields as diverse as computer music, tuning theory, and integrating ideas from acoustics and music cognition into his work. Tenney has also been important as a teacher, performer, and scholar of other radical American composers. This CD contains recordings of the complete set of his Postal Pieces, written primarily during a very brief tenure at California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s. These works, although frequently performed over the years, have not been recorded (with a few exceptions). This recording is a natural and important companion to the recent New World reissue of Tenney's computer and electronic music from the 1960s. Both collections represent complete, highly individualistic and essential bodies of work by a major American artist."
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CD
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NW 80570CD
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"The work of James Tenney (b. 1934) as a composer, theorist, performer, and teacher, is of singular importance in American music of the past four decades. He is by nature a quiet, almost publicity-shy musician, but his musical and theoretical works are steadily becoming widely known, despite the fact that few have been published and only a relatively small number, to this date, are readily available on recordings. This recording is a reissue of the 1992 Frog Peak/Artifact CD, the first recorded collection of James Tenney' s music of the 1 960s. Many of the pieces on this CD were realized at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1961 to 1969, where Tenney used Max Mathews's digital synthesis program, which eventually became Music IV. This software became the model for many of the common computer music environments of the last forty years, and was the first system of its kind available to composers. Tenney's pieces from 1961-64 constitute the first significant and developed body of computer-composed and synthesized music by en American composer. Tenney was a very young composer when he wrote these pieces. He was working with a new medium, a technology that was still being developed, and a new aesthetic. It is perhaps easy to overlook the importance of the latter in the light of the tremendous technical and historical importance of these pieces -- but it is characteristic of Tenney that he was not content just to explore the sonic and technical capabilities of a new technology. To this day, his work from this period remains an important example for composers who work with new technologies: the new world of 'computer music' needed a radically new definition of music itself. The 32-page booklet includes greatly expanded liner notes by composer and former Tenney pupil Larry Polanaky."
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2CD
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HAT 127
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World Premiere Recordings by musikFabrik. Total time 113.52. Works by: Tenney, Edgar Varese, John Cage, Stefan Wolpe, Morton Feldman. "What James Tenney does have in common with the composers to whom he has dedicated his FORMS, however, is not a specific approach to dynamics, but to sound. And precisely this inquiring interest in sound, both as a physical phenomenon and as regards its perception, was a constant leitmotif that pervaded the whole American avant-garde from its European counterparts, which was more structurally and historically oriented." -- Raoul Mörchen.
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